Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Musings on Dungeons

The dungeon I am running at Gold Star Anime involves a new technique for me. In this post I talk about minimal dungeons and with the ruined Elven Temple I am applying the technique. So far it is going good and the players seem to have a lot of fun.

One thing I thought about was how to run the maze. My experience with live action roleplaying has given me an appreciation for "out of the box" thinking to simulate different roleplaying scenarios. I realized that I could use the Dwarven Forge Master Maze set I had to good effect. In this case the limited amount of pieces I possessed was an advantage.

I have enough pieces to represent the maze 40 feet in all directions. So instead of drawing it out on the battleboard or verbal describing it I use the pieces to built one section at time. As the party moved one I tore down the area they left and built the area they entered. If they choose to do so they could spend a little time mapping it.

It worked very well as the party picked their way through the maze. The master maze set I had replicated the confusing nature of the labyrinth without giving the part hints about where they came from. Setup was not too slow and allowed the players to think about where they were going next. Mapping attempts worked as well as may experienced crawling through a few labyrinths in live-action which to say it sucked. Josh playing Hazar had a pretty good instinct about where the dungeon was going so he gets the maze master award for the session. Myself I always solved the issue with the right hand left hand technique.

The only time I abandoned the technique was during the minotaurs. To make the description as fast paced as the chase I used my battle mat and dry erase. That worked well as the player ran blindly through the maze trying to get away from the minotaur.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.